The Rams' complete salary cap position heading into free agency

Edit:This article has been updated to reflect new NFL Team salary cap numbers after a release by the NFLPA today

With the new NFL year beginning this Wednesday, 9th March at 4 p.m. ET, we thought it was just the right time to see how the Rams look financially as the annual NFL shopping spree is about to get underway.

Under league rules, as of today teams can approach impending free agents to discuss terms and gauge interest, but no deals can be made official until Wednesday.

After the release of a final figure for the 2016 NFL salary cap of $155.27 million and a confirmed carry over for the Rams of $933,521 from 2015 by the NFLPA, we can be quite sure about the teams cap position at this point in the year.

Since the introduction of the new CBA in 2011 and thanks to the relevant transparency of the NFL salary structure, it has become much easier for fans and media to generate a more accurate picture surrounding the financials that make up the Rams cap position.

We have compiled a detailed breakdown of the 2016 Rams salary cap to include all of the recent futures signings, player releases as well as all options exercised or not on certain unrestricted and restricted free agents. We also have accounted for roll-over amounts, all dead monies and any expected salary cap costs for 2016:

With over $42 million in cap space to play with the Rams are in an envious position when compared to teams like the Washington Redskins and the New York Jets.

The Rams have the 9th highest amount of cap room to spend in the NFL this year. Among their NFC West rivals, only the San Francisco 49ers have more salary cap space. The Arizona Cardinals lag way behind with barely a third of the cap room and the Seattle Seahawks have less than half the budget the Rams have to spend.

Related

For those wondering about some of the additional charges in the table above:

All teams have an additional charge of $561,600 added to their salary cap to cover for team workout bonuses. This number is essentially the total amount of CBA mandated workout bonuses that could be earned by the players in the offseason at a rate of $195 a day. This amount is a debited from the cap at the start of the year and the actual amount of workout bonuses earned by the players will be adjusted later on in the year before the training camp begins.

Since the Rams already have 53 players under contract they are past the rule of 51 they need to count for salary cap purposes and so we have removed the two lowest contracts each with a value of $450,000 or a total of $900,000.

Many of the figures used in these tables have come from OverTheCap, Rotoworld, Spotrac and individual twitter and internet sites. It would be remiss to not point out how invaluable in particular OverTheCap has been in helping us keep track of changes and contract amounts. We encourage anyone who notices any errors in these numbers to let us know so we can update our calculations.

Related

On a daily basis there are few finer sites than OverTheCap when it comes to providing up to date and reliable salary cap information or the NFLPA’s own site and as free agents are signed they are a good source for updates.

However, since the above mentioned sites cover all 32 NFL teams and we here at Rams Wire only care about one, you can be assured our data will always be updated the second the team makes a move.